International Dialogue of Experimental Architecture,
a two-day international symposium organised with the New Metropole Gallery, Folkestone and BASA (British Architectural Students Association).
Nowadays people – particularly friends or commentators from France, Germany or Scandinavia – constantly refer to ‘Folkestone’ as a key event. It marked the beginning of a major aspect of our survival – to use the word in its ethical rather than its material sense. It is one thing to exchange letters and pamphlets with Hans Hollien, another to have him around; one thing for Reyner Banham to give us the first serious critical support (and critical stimulus), another to have him physically and gregariously present. It exposed us to the beginnings of the long period of love/hate that existed between us and the French and (later) German bodies of Marxist intellectuals who (as we often said amongst ourselves) preached anti-materialism but had a Mercedes parked around the corner. They came to Folkestone and chanted slogans, but never came up with anything as formally whizzy as our stuff! Maybe that was the problem.
Claude Parent and Paul Virilio – now each in his own way recognised (in the French pavilion at the Venice Biennale ’96) as a key figure in the explosion of urban thinking – were there, in Cardin suits and a Rolls-Royce. At the time they were (like Cedric was in the beginning) slightly grand. The whole European connection, those surprising 300 who ferried, cycled (or Rolls-Royced) over at £3 a crossing direct from Calais to Folkestone, met up with the other 300, mostly from London NW3.
The missing component was Greene and Webb – missing in the sense that they had both gone to teach in the United States, up on the hilltop retreat of VPI where Archigram was so far little known (and therefore no threat). Out of this creative exile came Webb’s ‘Cushicle’ and Greene’s ‘Living Pod’. The Pod arrived in a box and with its accompanying drawings was a tremendous uplift to the London contingent. The Cushicle, too, confirmed what we had always known, that Mike could sit anywhere – in a hut, a shed, a bedroom – and just explore away. The succinct power of the Cushicle stood beside the ‘Furniture Factory’ and the ‘Sin Centre’ as a unique but instantly memorable icon.
A pattern was set. Ron and Warren spent a few years in the USA, David returned, and Mike has lived there ever since. His kids are grown up and are, I suppose, American, though he has retained a wonderfully intact accent as well as an almost forgotten pace of speaking – lost from the English of the Estuary and the mobile, but which from him authenticates the gradual (and very straight) description of his spatial, geometrical and temporal explorations.
The early 1970s affected Mike’s work only slightly: there is of course a certain parody of the American way of life in ‘Rent-a-Wall’ or ‘Dreams Come True’, which is dispensed with fairly obviously in the ‘Henley’ project, which seems to be his fourth classic ‘base’. Except for the ‘Furniture Factory’, they have all been returned to in several sorties and given successive layers of meaning, exploration, rarification and obsession. In recent years Webb has become a brilliant lecturer, using his slight play at being the English Eccentric as a means (it would seem) to get the audience to slow down and concentrate, to somehow come inside his mind and worry at a point with him.
All this is far from Folkestone, for the event was a rally as much as anything else. Indeed, its 10th anniversary was called ‘The Rally’ (held at Art Net in London, with ‘Folkestone Veteran’ badges available to those who attended both events). The making of plastic dresses, the camping on the cliffs – and, I suppose, the French chanting – were essential ingredients of the rhetoric that we had introduced way back in 1961 with the cry ‘You can roll out steel … ANY LENGTH!’ In David’s challenge lay the invective that shouted ‘stop’ to all that mimsy English imitation Corbusier as well as the straight reactionary stuff. Historians will probably choose their own preference – the reiterative, monk-like research of Webb’s investigations (though himself far from a monk, there is something timeless and detached about him) or the clear markers (Archigram 1, IDEA Folkestone, the Archigram exhibitions at the ICA in 1973 and Vienna 1994) that inevitably, by celebrating loudly, bypass the really gritty aspects of the work.
Within the untidy structure of it all and the questions asked – How did you all add up, if from different schools? How did you/do you correspond with Mike? By the time you had an office, who was actually in there? Did you draw it all yourself/selves? Did Archigram ever really stop? (to which those of us who didn’t stop drawing would probably say ‘No, in a way, no’ – there probably lies a giant clue. The strength of Archigram was surely its layers of inconsistent parts, keeping going a continual fascination with each other rather than a statutory obligation to keep in chorus.
Peter Cook
PRESS RELEASE
INTERNATIONAL DIALOGUE IN EXPERIMENTAL ARCHITECTURE, 1966
Statement of Intention and aim
The situation in architecture has reached a crisis point at which thinking architects find themselves taking sharply divergent paths away from the security of the Modern Movement. A glance at the pages of any illustrated magazine will show that there is an increasing feeling towards experiment, invention and general questioning of organic and static methods. In Europe, America and Japan in particular, there have been notable investigations made towards re-defining the idea of the City – or exploding it. The constraint of the single layer, two-dimensional urban plan has been exploded and the implications of large structures, grids of connection and the possibility of an interchangeable, throw-away architecture scene is a challenge. The methods and materials of technology are now being seen as catalysts for a new architecture and many serious-minded designers are trying to establish concepts and values in terms of plastics, steel, aluminium and tension-net structures.
[L]ionel Schein in Paris and Arthur Quarmby in England are the principal experimenters in the field of plastic home units; Yona Friedman, Hans Hollein, Groupe Architecture Principe, Jos Weber and the Archigram group have been experimenting in problems of urbanism; Cedric Price’s work concerns the possibilities of transitory and expendable architecture, as do the projects of the Archigram group.
It was thought important that these architects should meet and discuss their ideas and the latest situation of their work in front of other architects and students. The New Metropole Gallery has the space for a large and comprehensive exhibition of their work (and the work of other experimental architects throughout the world) which will take the form of large drawings, models, projected images and a collection of full-size, inflatable and tensegrity structures outside the building. It seemed important to collect together the evidence that this work is international and growing in relevance but is still at a formative stage and it is hoped that there will be a feed-back from the other delegates to the main participants. The organisers believe strongly that a two-way public interchange is the best way of developing an understanding of new architectural ideas.
There is to be a special section of the exhibition of students work in addition to the recording of the event by film and further documentation in architectural magazines. A catalogue will be issued prior to the conference date which will consist of a basic documentary listing of the participants and their work and a comprehensive bibliography, so that some of the terms of reference will be understood by all concerned. Professor R. Buckminster Fuller and Professor Frei Otto have been invited and we are still awaiting their acceptance.
Dr. Reyner Banham has agreed to come if commitments allow.
I.D.E.A. is organised jointly by the New Metropole Gallery, Folkestone, Kent, Archigram Magazine and B.A.S.A.
